POC21: DAY THREE and FOUR

A lot is happened the last two days. It was like everything was happening at the same time. POC21 is a unique experience where you put 100 creative eco-inventers together with all their own skill and you try to squeeze out the best possible thing.

So on the third day we started to structure the things we observed around us to take best use off: everybody has a speciality and has lots of knowledge,the best tactic is to find the right person to help us to find the best solution. We want to have a good working battery, so one of our engineers start to search for every possible project at POC21 that has something to do with energy: Sunzilla, Open Energy Monitoring, 30$ wind turbine and starts planning a meeting.

At the same time we get awesome news from Cycle-In from Elsene that sends us all information about how to build a regenerating pedal powered bicycle structure. But that is not the only find of the day, we manage to contact CinéCyclo, a france based cargobike cinema with whom we exchange some possible ideas. Lets see what these collaborations will bring the project to a new level

We almost forgot what time it was, this time not dinnertime, but the time our bike arrives at POC21 accompanied by Florent, another engineer from Ciklic. It is like Christmas coming early. Florent is immediately bombarded by hundreds of new information and he will need to adapt really fast, we give him a last update before sleep. Day four will be a critical day.

In the early morning we are convened to the central room to have our first look at the mentors day. Six specialists of all different areas come to help us think, rethink and discuss our project. We learn about the bigger picture with climate change specialists, look at the community of instructable, the designer tool Autodesk and lean more about Fablabs. But my mentor sessions are suddenly interrupted because I need to do my duties. Like explained earlier, every person is responsible for a part of the camp. I assigned myself to kitchen duties and will be doing that till 19h clock. Why I’m cooking almost all day: because our two engineers at camp have an important task: organize a energy meeting / brainstorm with all people working around that Area at POC. So I took one of their duties.

Before I go into the details of the meeting, I need to explain how impressed I was by the level of involvement the POC organisation has around sustainability. Not only do we compost, use the least possible water, and have almost no food waste: our kitchen staff managed to have a deal with a big supermarket to come get all food that will be thrown away. It is impressive how much good food is thrown away like that. With all those vegetable, meat, fruit we managed to cook for 100 people without any problem. This deserves a big round of applause!

But the biggest effort our team managed to conquer was organizing a brainstorm meeting with almost 20 people, all involved in renewable energy to try to find a method to put everything in one system. It is a challenge we are going to take, but we think that if we find a global system that involves all the energy projects at the end of POC21, we would have realised something really interesting. Building together, all through our own projects. The true meaning of Open Source.